By Rashid Ahmad | The Honour Magazine2/22/2012 7:28:16
Srinagar: India and Pakistan are working on a peace plan on Kashmir through back-channel peace actors to defrost their relations. The peace plan however is more like providing a ‘safe and respectable’ passage to all the three parties—Kashmiri people, India and Pakistan—from the quagmire they have been caught in. The moderate faction of the Huriyat Conference is reported to have Okayed the plan. Read more…

LAHORE/NEW DELHI – A subtle shift may be occurring in one of the world’s longest-standing and most intractable conflicts – the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Increasingly, it seems, Pakistanis are questioning what the
Kashmir dispute has done to their own state and society

THE POLICE has been lauded for its stellar role in the fight against militancy in Jammu & Kashmir, but the defence ministry does not trust its investigation into human rights violations by armymen. In 19 out of the 24 cases forwarded by the J&K government for sanction for prosecution, the ministry found the probes to be shoddy. In some cases, the ministry even suspects foul play by the police and is still mulling some of the evidence gathered in other cases. Read more…

THE VOICE of Syed Ali Shah Geelani has become tremulous over the years but it remains defiant. “Whether Pakistan supports our cause or not, I have unshakeable faith in Allah, who will help Kashmiris. But the only condition is that we must correct ourselves,” says the Hurriyat (G) supremo at his daughter’s residence in New Delhi. Read more…

Centre could approach the separatists after the report by interlocutors fails to find any takers

Iftikhar Gilani
New Delhi

Syed Ali Shah Geelani

The Centre could possibly warm up to separatists again to maintain peace in Jammu & Kashmir after the report of interlocutors didn’t find any takers even before going public. Exactly a year after disregarding the separatists’ overtures, the Union government is now dusting out pre-conditions and formula set by them.

Moderate Hurriyat chief Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s 10-point prerequisite and his hardline colleague Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s five-point formula, proposed last year at the height of street protests, was rebuffed by officials and the political brass here, who instead appointed a three-member panel comprising noted journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, academic Radhka Kumar and bureaucrat MM Ansari. A ‘quite dialogue’ between the moderate faction of Hurriyat and Home Minister P Chidambaram ended abruptly in December 2009 after a deadly assault on a key leader Fazl Haque Qureshi.

Failing to find the separatists on the same note, the Centre could wink first. There is possibility of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself taking charge of Kashmir as prior to 2008, when separatists were invited for talks. It was quite evident by the way the Home Ministry went into a fire-fighting exercise after chief interlocutor Padgaonkar said that the separatists had missed the bus by refusing to meet the panel.

A Home Ministry official dismissed the belief that the there was no hope for dialogue after the interlocutors were rebuffed by the separatists. There was still hope for dialogue, the official said implying that the separatists could be approached. “The report is not the end of the day,” he said. Referring to separatists, the official said, “We have to acknowledge the reality; they are there.” Describing the report of interlocutors as an important milestone in the peace process, the official said, “It is an ongoing process and not an end.”

Ahead of the summer protests that claimed more than 100 lives, Farooq had kicked off the dialogue by presenting a 10-point charter.
1. Immediate end of military, para-military and militant action.
2. Withdrawal of the army from towns and villages, and dismantling bunkers, watch towers and barricades.
3. Release of political prisoners.
4. End of human rights violations.
5. Annulling repressive laws.
6. Restoring the rights of peaceful association, assembly and demonstration.
7. Allowing the Kashmiri leadership, which favours a negotiated resolution, to travel abroad.
8. Issuing visas to the Kashmiri diaspora to visit the state.
9. Creating necessary conditions for an intra-Kashmiri dialogue embracing both sides of the ceasefire line.
10. Allowing a transitional phase before the decisive elements of the peace package are put into effect. Read more…

Banyan
Autumn has brought an outbreak of good sense in Kashmir, but can it last?
Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition

LOOKING for signs of cheer can be frustrating in Kashmir, the stunning mountain territory over which India and Pakistan have argued for more than 60 years, and three times gone to war. The most highly contested area, the Kashmir valley—controlled by India, populated mostly by Muslims and contested by Pakistan—has by turns been the focus of militancy, terrorism, popular violence and state repression. There have been lulls in violence, and shifts in strategy or fortune among actors. But those who discern an opening for a more hopeful future, even a glimmer of outright resolution, have always been proved wrong.

Yet there seems room, for now, for relations to warm. Take, for example, the swift and friendly return from Pakistan of an Indian army helicopter and crew which drifted 12 miles (19 km) over the Kashmiri line of control on October 23rd. What could easily have been a diplomatic rumpus instead became a token of tentative co-operation. Within the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir itself are signs of a new-found reasonableness. The state’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, has started saying in public what he has expressed in private for over a year: that it is time to scrap the repressive Armed Forces Special Powers Act. For two decades the law has given immunity to Indian soldiers who kill or beat up civilians. In some urban areas, Mr Abdullah says, it will no longer apply from early November. Army men will be aghast, but Mr Abdullah is quite right that it is not their job to decide.

All this has stirred debate. Less noticed but as important, on October 19th Mr Abdullah’s cabinet decided to revise the equally hated Public Safety Act. This has long been misused by police to detain suspects without charge, even children, for as long as two years. Amnesty International reckons that under this “lawless law” as many as 20,000 Kashmiris have been thrown behind bars over the past couple of decades. The revisions are too timid. But at least they should ensure that children are kept from jail—there can be no better place to radicalise them—and that detention without charge for people of any age is much curtailed.

Set against the grim mood of a year ago, all this is generally encouraging. In the summer of 2010 blundering police shot dead over 110 protesters taking part in something akin to anintifada. This year’s end-of-summer reckoning is happier: protests and violence have been much more muted. Meanwhile, more than 1m tourists, most of them Indian, have visited Kashmir, delivering a welcome economic boost. And now a report by a trio of interlocutors sent by the government in Delhi to study Kashmir’s problems for a year may also help. Handed in this month though not yet published, the report is expected to support: giving more autonomy to component parts of Kashmir (the valley, Jammu and Ladakh); helping the return of Kashmiri Pandits, the region’s upper-caste Hindus, and others forced out of Kashmir by violence; launching inquiries into killings; and easing the security laws.

It matters, too, that officials are starting to talk about horrors of the recent past. In August an official report confirmed claims by a local human-rights group that it had found more than 2,700 bodies in unmarked graves—most, probably, were militants killed by security forces. Mr Abdullah has called for DNA testing and an inquiry. The national government in Delhi may next announce a full judicial commission into widespread disappearances since Kashmir’s insurgency flared in 1989. As many as 8,000 people may be missing. It would take courage for political leaders to dig into that, but it would be a strong signal of a willingness to heed Kashmiris’ complaints of repression and misrule.

As important, though, India will need to see some signs of reciprocity. Some is coming from hardline Kashmiri separatists, and diehards over the border in Pakistan. How else to explain an apparently significant shift by the most prominent and popular separatist, the ageing Syed Ali Shah Geelani? On October 20th he aired the possibility of holding talks with the national government. That is striking for a man who made his name by vowing never to talk until India met a range of unmeetable demands, such as withdrawing all soldiers from Kashmir. Mr Geelani seems to be distancing himself from militants who continue not to countenance ever talking to the national government. Maybe his more moderate son and other advisers are gaining sway. They may imagine that something like Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement might one day be attainable in Kashmir.

If so, it would take much more than a change of heart by one leader. Pakistan’s role matters hugely. A shift of stance by Pakistan’s government, away from outright hostility to a willingness to resolve Kashmir’s place within India, might explain a change in the behaviour of even some militant groups. For instance, a dreaded terrorist outfit based in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, in effect said sorry for assassinating a moderate Kashmiri Islamic leader outside a mosque in Srinagar last April. Perhaps Pakistan’s rulers want nothing to scupper the chance of a new trade deal with India early next year. Such a deal would benefit Pakistan’s stuttering economy and boost those who barter chillies, mangoes and carpets over the Kashmiri line of control. If trade trumps terrorism, then Kashmiris would indeed have reason to cheer.

All blow away

The current affability, however, could yet blow away as quickly as bonfire smoke in a Srinagar sky. Several things crucial to any political settlement must exist at once for Kashmiris to believe in the possibility of peace: talks between the government and the separatists; talks between India and Pakistan; a readiness by Indian politicians to temper their strident nationalism; and efforts by Pakistani generals to stop militants on their side crossing the border. For now, optimists can see all these things coming together. Just as easily though, a big bomb attack on an Indian city traced to Kashmiri terrorists, or something harder for Pakistan to ignore than a straying helicopter, and it could all unravel again.